“Sting” features a modestly scaled horror caper where a spider attacks a couple of Brooklynites over the course of 91 minutes, which inludes the 7 minutes allocated to the closing credits. The running time feels undeniably short for the film because several characters and animal attack scenes feel rushed and underdeveloped. Even though there is only so much ferocity a B-movie like this can withstand, giving it an additional 15-20 minutes would have improved this Spielberg-y creature feature that Weta workshop “Lord of The Rings” had worked on. The directors of “Sting” led by Kiah Roache Turner, who previously worked on “Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead”, have clearly seen many genre movies but their cinephile does not aid them in delivering thrilling or adventurous drama to the audience.
Like a lot of post-Amblin entertainment, “Sting” depicts a nuclear family’s dysfunctional relationships when the film is not overly gory for a the ‘Animals On A Rampage’ genre. Ryan Corr plays Ethan, who is representative of the typical post-Spielberg fathers. Ethan’s greatest flaw is that he wears too many hats. He also happens to be the dilettante for a crudely accented super slumlord Gunter’s Brooklyn apartment complex. Ethan is also a rising comic book artist.
As he completes the cartoon, Ethan uses angst-filled pre-teen Charlotte (Alyla Brown), Heather’s (Penelope Mitchell) daughter, as a reference. Ethan’s partner, who is quite exasperated with him. Ethan cares to an extent but does not feel secure juggling his dual roles as the provider and the working stiff. Typically manageable problems, especially the dreadful bug problem in Gunter’s building, more than troublesome, tend to pile up quickly, alongside the gaping divide Ethan and Charlotte seem to methodically be fostering. And no adults are able to take the edges off of Ethan’s load, not even Frank (Jermaine Fowler), the angry, comic-exterminator. And here comes Charlotte, arguably the most sympathetic character of “Sting,” probably because she is the one that is surrounded by dramatic/situational danger.
You don’t need to like Charlotte to care about the scenes where she initially picks up and later chases after Sting, a pet spider who crashes to Earth in a pin-sized asteroid. Swinging over the course of the movie, Sting never quite registers as anything beyond a generic threat. Charlotte could have loved and later hated an irradiated field mouse or a man-eating toilet ‘gator. Surprisingly, it doesn’t mean anything that Sting is a spider, which is odd considering how much Charlotte and the rest spend traveling around Gunter’s building through a very elaborate system of air vent tunnels. One might expect an overworked father and an underappreciated daughter to have more to say about spiderwebs and family life. In this case, you would be wrong.
Aside from the normal goal of mending conflict, “Sting” does not offer clarity on Charlotte and Ethan’s dynamics. Wētā makes Charlotte’s spider look good for what it is a giant black widow but even the design is disappointing. That’s it? Just a black spider that happens to have a small red dash on its back? Come on! A well-designed but shallow black widow isn’t exactly monster movie Kryptonite. It gets boring by the time it is revealed that the characters are also archetypes, and the monster-centric scenes are so brief and badly paced that they do not have the time to build suspense or disgust.
The spider webs, bodily fluids, and gore effects mostly land anyway. This is so because they do not need much set-up or development. But everything that would need the Spielberg touch to work feels light and indistinct. Even the stickiest elements in the movie feel sketchy. Why is there so little, or such poor quality material, for Gunter’s forgetful sister Helga (Noni Hazelhurst) who is the first character in the movie to see Charlotte’s pet? Ditto for Frank, who is a weary side character burdened with too much work and is too willing of an actor. It is obvious that these people were meant to be sympathized with, yet so many scenes and one-liners and plot points are far too lazy. When these things should be prepared with the kind of thought and effectiveness Spielberg would put in, they are instead careless. Otherwise, why should audience members have to look for better monster movies than this one?
Right now, copying Spielberg and his successors isn’t an automatic demerit, but it can be if you do not have the patience to study them. “Sting” feels like a movie made by anover-zealous but careless fans. The lines ”Why didn’t you get a ****ing dog?!” have no context preceding them that makes them funny so are devoid of any comic buildup. And as for the fight scenes, they usually commence and conclude without enough energy or grace to feel significant.
As Eric pants, he scrambles up a vertical air duct during a fairly monotonous but inaccurately energetic pursuit. One can only speculate why Dad is breathing heavily, but there is not enough evidence of his effort on screen. There are not enough gaps for us either to bask in dread or feel sympathy towards Eric and his family, causing fast-paced segments to feel almost sluggish, and slow parts to feel far too rapid. “Sting” gets a fair portion of things right, but lacks the motivation to tie them all appropriately together.
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